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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Estate of Suzanne Cecil
• Sale Date:
  15 May 2016 ~ 2.30pm
• Lot #:
  4
• Lot Description:
  Frederick McCubbin
  (1855-1917)
  Landscape, South Yarra
  oil on canvas on board
  49.5 x 59.5 cm
  signed lower right: F McCubbin
• Provenance:
  Acquired by Mrs Elsie Dennett from John A. Hogan, Melbourne, 1957; Thence by descent
• Notes:
  Until the National Gallery of Australia put on Frederick McCubbin’s ‘Last Impressions’ exhibition in 2009, a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention had been devoted to the artist’s work from the nineteenth century. Ron Radford, then NGA Director, amplified this observation when he wrote that works from this period, when compared to McCubbin’s maturity, are generally ‘overrated as works of art. They are sentimental as subjects, and uninspired in execution […] most of the pure landscapes painted by McCubbin in the 1880s and 1890s are dull in atmosphere and paint surface.’1 Of course, it is true that these were the years in which McCubbin, together with Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder had steadily forged an important new Australian School of painting; a collaborative movement which represented local narratives and national themes in techniques broadly derived from French nineteenth century plein-air Naturalism and Impressionism. For McCubbin, the oldest of the group – who was born in Melbourne and almost never drifted far from its surrounds – the ideas and techniques of his European contemporaries were mostly consumed second-hand, either through his association with artists who had been abroad, via reproductions of works held in European collections or by the few minor examples in Victoria’s National Gallery. This perhaps explains why McCubbin’s subject pictures painted between 1886 and 1907 – although now considered icons of Australian art – are more memorable for their sentimental narratives and nostalgic associations than for their technique or style. It was not until 1907, at the age of fifty-two, that McCubbin undertook a short yet consequential trip to England and France. This, his first and last sojourn in the Old Continent, had a lasting transformative effect on his art. In London he visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, and the Tate. Here he finally saw, in the depth and understanding one can only achieve through the first-hand observation of art, the works of J. M. W. Turner – an artist he had long admired but was hitherto unable to wholly appreciate and intelligently draw inspiration from. Standing in front of the works of late Turner, the Painter of Light, he was mesmerised by ‘such dreams of colour – a dozen of them are like Pearls’ he wrote to his wife, ‘no theatrical effects but mist and cloud and sea and land drenched in light – no other master like him – they glow with a tender brilliancy that radiates from these canvases.’2 Even as he continued onto Paris – and after having seen the works of Monet and Sisley – it was the English master that lingered in McCubbin’s mind as he saw Paris ‘just like Turner painted it’.3 From now on and until the end of this career, Turner’s expressiveness in colour and brilliance in light would take on a primary role. With this new stimulus for his art, McCubbin was excited when he arrived back in Melbourne later that year. Adding to the enthusiasm was the move to a new home and studio, named Carlsberg, at 42 Kensington Road in Melbourne’s South Yarra. This is the subject of (Lot 4) Landscape, South Yarra. Except for a small group of portraits, interiors and city scapes, McCubbin spent a great deal of his dotage painting the immediate surrounds of his house. He expressed his joy for this new riverside residence in a letter to his old friend, Tom Roberts, having found 'the loveliest place I have ever lived in, perched right over the Yarra with three acres of garden [...] we can see every way.'4 Carlsberg, for McCubbin offered a juste milieu between the urban and the rural, and often included both elements in his works. In fact, the present work can be divided into three separate spheres of the artist’s life. Firstly, in the foreground, there is the kept green lawn suggesting the present domesticated clearings of his Carlsberg home; secondly, there is the middle ground, that wild untamed bushland, the unknown and uninhabited boscage which completely consumed the compositions of his most famous past pioneer and sentimental works; and finally, in the distance to the left, McCubbin hints to the future – the growing city of Melbourne where he exhibited and sold his works. Each of these areas is confined and separated by borders including the fence, the riverbank and the sky. In its composition, Landscape, South Yarra is broadly related to Yarra River from Kensington Road, South Yarra 1917 (private collection, sold for $933,000, Sotheby’s 23 May 2005) and Autumn Morning (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). It is distinguished, however, by a peculiar vibrancy and brilliance that characterizes the very best work of late McCubbin; the paint surface is made up of a combination of technically complex methods including the application of oils with a palette knife. The scratched and scraped surface reveals an evolving composition of colour and light. With very little actual brushwork, the kaleidoscopic mélange of greens, pinks, purples and blues, eventually creates a shimmering fuzziness which gives this winter’s sunset a sparkling glow. As was the custom of his fellow Impressionists, McCubbin returned to the same subject or location in different seasons or at varying times of the day. Bush Landscape 1910 (Lot 2) is one of those brilliant oil sketches which consumed a large part of McCubbin’s maturity, but a subject which he had also represented almost a decade earlier. Hence, it is useful to compare it to Bush Study 1902 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). While the 1902 example shows the typical softly focused bush view, bathed in the grey-green tones of his earlier oeuvre, the present work is built up with layers of animated paintwork. Executed on a small Winsor and Newton ‘Oil Sketching Tablet', a support often used by the artist, it is freer in approach and closer to the impressionist aesthetic and technique whereby representing the fleeting glances of light and colour is more important than the subject itself. Landscape, South Yarra and Bush Landscape 1910 have remained with the Cecil/Dennett family for almost ten and five decades respectively. They are both brilliant examples of Old Mac’s final period. ‘When he died’, wrote Barry Pearce, ‘McCubbin was one of the very few Australian painters who found an exalted resolution of vision that progressed with age, so that some of his greatest paintings were made in the last ten years of his life.'5 And so it was. Petrit Abazi 1 Ron Radford, ‘Introduction’, in McCubbin: last impressions 1907-17, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2009, p. 10 2 Cited in Andrew McKenzie, Frederick McCubbin 1855-1917: ‘The Proff’ and his art, Mannagum Press, Lilydale, Victoria, 1990, p. 259 3 Cited in Anne Gray, ‘Happy beyond measure: a life’, in McCubbin: last impressions 1907-1917, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2009, p. 32 4 Cited in Jane Clark, A Happy Life: Frederick McCubbin's small paintings and oil sketches, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1991, p. 6 5 Barry Pearce, A Century of Australian Landscape: mood and moment, Beagle Press, Sydney, 1983, p. 57
• Estimate:
  A$150,000 - 200,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.